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Resin Printed Moderator

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OldSpook

OldSpook

Member
Apr 25, 2021
2,104
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Virginia, United States
www.ebay.com
@bigHUN Want to say you were right about using a resin printer. I really like the one I just got. Still learning but I can put three of these on the bed at one time and print them in 3hrs. Just blisteing fast compared to FDM. Very little post processing. I could push six or eight of these out the door in an 8 hour shift, no problem. If I went for a one piece model I could do significantly more per day.
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Now that I am getting some reliability with the resin printer, I am going to increase the resolution of the models. That will improve laminar flow over the tesla baffles. I'm getting six tesla baffles in 128mm with an air stripper as the first "baffle". This specific model is quite nice and the testers are pleased with both the accuracy and the suppression.
 
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Firewalker said:
The text on the ends is beautiful!
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I am finally ready to go into production but I'm selling off the test models first. They were all printed on the FDM printers and aren't that hard to look at either. I'm keeping the price on them down so that people who are price sensitive can get a good moderator. This specific model will probably sell around $55.00 shipped. I have not calculated the cost of materials yet.
 
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Firewalker said:
I'd be bugging you for a can but I'm a fan of square corners and straight walls, a soup-can style if you will. In fact, one about the size of a soup-can would awesome!
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Keep watching the classifieds. Some of the test units will be listed. I try not to swamp the classified section because other folks want to sell their stuff and it would be wrong to just dump eight or ten moderators in the classifieds. Well I think it would be wrong so wont do it.
 
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Smitty911 said:
OldSpook,
You might want to play around with the different resins, the ones I used to do were very brittle and if you looked at them sideways they'd crack. I know there are several new resins out that have a little more give to them. Just an idea.

Smitty
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Still just learning the printer. I will research resins in the near term.
 
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While people are bringing up the topic of resins, yes a lot of "standard" or "prototype" resins tend to be of the brittle acrylic variety. That said, there's a wild world of available resins out there to choose from.

I'm a big fan of ApplyLabWork's "Robust Champagne" for applications that need to take a beating. https://applylabwork.com/prototype-engineering-series-robust-champagne-formlabs-printers-compatible/

Depending on how you mount your moderator you may want to stiffen up the portion with the threads. You can mix in stiffer-curing resins to produce a part with all your desired properties. Most of my functional prints are done with a combination of "Robust Champagne" and "Expert Black" from ALW.
 
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Good thread, and glad to see different technologies being used. My initial concern was the potential, initial brittleness as well, but that's been addressed by other posters. My other concern is "long-term" durability - how do these newer resins hold up to "natural" UV light, as in day to day exposure? I've seen older examples, and spoke with researchers who commented on parts becoming increasingly brittle over time.
 
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TN_Yankee said:
Good thread, and glad to see different technologies being used. My initial concern was the potential, initial brittleness as well, but that's been addressed by other posters. My other concern is "long-term" durability - how do these newer resins hold up to "natural" UV light, as in day to day exposure? I've seen older examples, and spoke with researchers who commented on parts becoming increasingly brittle over time.
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I've had some engineering resin prints (flexible, durable, etc) in my office window, exposed to low amounts of UV radiation every day, for the past two years. So far they're all doing well. None have shown significant signs of change. I've been meaning to leave some outside in the sun and rain, but have not tried that yet.
 
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Brittle parts not necessarily from resin properties only, you may have over baked it during UV curing. Try next time to submerge in a jar full with water, I know the distilled water would be ideal but I am using a simple tap water very successfully. Not sure what is a size of your UV curing table/machine, find a jar that fits on rotating table without tipping.
Also, you can eliminate the brittle by mixing resins. 3:1 or 4:1. I have a separe bottle where I am mixing the ratio's on a weight scale filling the VAT from that. I always mix a full bottle volume and use only as much needed. And the extra can sit in a VAT (in a dark) for months... this why we use several VATs so we can store the resin for a next project.
I can recommend the SirayaTech Tenacious flexible resin to mix with any other engineering resin, ratio 1:3 will give you like ABS.
From ABS like engineering resins I like the eSun Hard Tough, SirayaTech Blu Tough, Liqcreate Strong, and usually I am printing Z level resolution 50 microns.
 
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And I forgot to say, that part which looks like a sponge in OP ... yes, you can print from resin as well if you have a model for it.
If your model is full solid there is still a chance. Pre-process it in UVTools, the function is called ... cannot remember now not with my PC... something like corosion effects, removes the pixels from the surface or random pixels from entire body. That is some sub-sub menu button.
I have tried it ones some random settings, it looks like these, but need to play with numbers to remove more pixels:

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